Right cheers Bob Woodward 'fact check'

2/26/13 9:44 AM EST

Conservatives in the media have found themselves armed with political ammunition in their battle with President Barack Obama over the impending sequester from a surprising source — Bob Woodward.

The journalism icon’s fact check on the sequester in The Washington Post over the weekend and the subsequent blowback has caused a major stir, with pundits and reporters pouncing on the item. In his piece, Woodward laid the blame on the White House for the sequester, pinpointing the administration as responsible for coming up with the plan for automatic spending cuts and calling out Obama for claiming it was created by Congress.

Among the media commentariat on the right, the journalist who has long been characterized as left-of-center and a liberal hero is now being widely cited for his op-ed naming the sequester as the White House’s brain child. With his reporting, Woodward has given Republicans and conservatives major talking points to cast the looming cuts as Obama’s responsibility alone — and those in conservative quarters are crediting him for challenging the White House.

“Apparently Woodward doesn’t view his job as being a total lapdog for Obama,” Sean Hannity said on his radio show Monday.

Hannity told his listeners that Woodward is “doing the job, frankly, that few journalists are willing to do, and that’s actually tell the truth and dig down a little deeper.”

And Buck Sexton of Glenn Beck’s The Blaze praised Woodward for bringing the issue to light, calling the White House response a case of the administration “trying to spin the story after the fact.”

“Woodward’s piece made perfect sense to me,” he told POLITICO. “I think it’s pretty clear to everyone who is watching this whole sequestration play out that the Obama administration has overreached and they really thought Republicans would not go for the cuts.”

“[The Obama administration] wasn’t so vehement about what Woodward said until it became clear that the GOP was going to go through with it,” Sexton added. “If this were so odious and wrong from the onset, you would think there would be a lot of noise from the start that this was from the Congress."